Harry The Hobbit
by nothing new in this world
Summary: Because Harry's second chance at life just couldn't be normal either... [warnings: AU, fem!Harry (sort of...), drabbles more than actual chapters, no pairings]
1. Awakening

**This Plot Bunny has been bothering the hell out of me for a while already, to the point that I can't resist publishing this first little text and see what sort of response it gets.**

**Anyway! I usually don't do this before any sort of chapter, but I'm going to rant a little bit just to let you know where I'm coming from with this idea (as well as issue a few warnings about details of this plot that could unsettle people).**

**This story came from several differnt things at the same time: I grew up reading Harry Potter and always wished I had a nice idea for a fanfic one day; the concept of reincarnation has been on my mind for a few years already (you know, with all the usual questions: do the concepts of time and space remain the same? or even the concepts of dimensions, of race, of gender? do you ever meet the souls you were close to again like your family and friends? how about your personality and character traits - are they intrinsically linked to your soul? etc.); and I have been waaayyy more interested in The Hobbit movie than what is strictly healthy...**

**So here it comes: Harry Potter and The Hobbit CROSSOVER!**

**AU WARNING!**

**Disclaimer (as it will stand for the whole fanfic): I do not own in any manner Harry Potter or The Hobbit, they are the properties of their respective authors and I am simply writing this story for entertainment.**

**With that being said, I hope you'll enjoy this story! Thank you for reading!**

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It was the poking that had woken him first.

Harry had been sleeping quite peacefully—more peacefully than he could ever remember sleeping in fact—when a large, annoyingly insistent finger repeatedly probing at his side had wrenched him from his deep slumber. The sensation had been like nothing he'd ever felt and really very disagreeable: like his mind, blissfully numb and empty, had been torn from the warm and snuggly oblivion to be bombarded instead with what felt like a tsunami of sensations all at once.

The coolness of the air on his humid skin. The thick strands of hair sticking to his forehead and nape. The dull throb in his head making it difficult to think properly. The soreness in his every limbs. The slight burn at the back of his throat every time he breathed. The sounds all around where previously he'd only been aware of perfect silence. And most of all the light endeavouring to pierce through his closed eyelids and blind his overly sensitive pupils...

Very disagreeable indeed. It was what he imagined a butterfly, whose cocoon had been wrenched from him before it was time, would have felt like (he suddenly had a very deep new-found empathy for all those poor silk-worms who had suffered to create Aunt Petunia's innumerable frilly camisoles and shirts...).

His one and only attempt to get rid of the finger pestering him had been to bat at said finger, which had in turn brought on the realization that any kind of physical effort would have to be forgotten for the moment: he couldn't remember ever feeling so... _heavy_ and clumsy in his whole life. Like his own body wasn't responding properly to his will. Just the simple act of lifting his arm and waving it like he wanted to necessitated an amount of strength he wasn't sure he had. He knew he should have been worried, for such an intense exhaustion could only have been caused by something serious that had taxed his body like never before (it reminded him a little bit of the one instance he'd gone through magical exhaustion, only ten times worse) but he simply couldn't bring himself to care a single bit.

Harry was tired. He was sore. He only wanted to sleep some more.

Then he'd taken note of the voices.

"Is it normal that she's not crying?" an adult, distinctly male, voice asked in a fretful tone. "Are babies not supposed to cry? I thought they took their first breath this way and-"

_Oh. No._ If there was a baby in the room, then Harry could say goodbye to his couple more hours of sleep. True, he didn't know a whole lot about babies, but in his humble opinion he knew more than enough: babies cried. And crying babies would mean an impossibility to sleep undisturbed much longer.

"Calm down, Master Baggins, your daughter is just fine," the voice of an older woman snapped in response, interrupting the worried man's ranting before it truly had a chance to start. "Look at her: she's breathing on her own, isn't she?"

Harry liked that old woman already. She sounded an awful lot like Professor McGonagall when she scolded Seamus after yet another explosion in a classroom. Or Neville who just couldn't get the spell right no matter how many times it was explained to him. Or Harry himself when he spouted some sort of 'nonsensical stupidity' that had her almost rolling her eyes (he'd never managed to exasperate her quite enough to reach that level where she would roll them for good though).

"I can see that," the man replied bashfully. "I just thought... You know..."

"Yes, yes, your first baby—a beautiful, healthy girl! All the reasons in the world to be worried already!" Judging from the sound, the old woman was turning and walking away, grumbling all the while. Harry didn't manage to distinctly hear what she was saying, but he distinguished a mutter or two about 'ridiculous hobbits' (whatever that meant), 'coming of age' and 'premature heart attacks'.

"Isn't she beautiful?" a third voice, a woman but distinctly younger this time, suddenly piped up. Her tone was filled with a happiness and warmth that instantly reminded Harry of Mrs. Weasley, for whatever reason (they sounded in fact nothing alike). "Look at her, Bungo, sleeping so peacefully."

Of what she'd said, Harry mostly took note of the fact that the baby was asleep and thus unlikely to disturb him if he tried to get a bit more rest.

He _had,_ in fact, registered that none of the three voices he'd heard, none of the names he'd picked up on, were familiar to him. He had also deducted that it most likely meant he was in a place entirely foreign to him. However, just like for his unusual level of fatigue, he couldn't bring himself to worry in the slightest about it: he was sure he would have all the time in the world to figure it out later, once his brain wasn't so foggy anymore.

"Ah, you're right, Bella," the man, whose name was apparently Bungo—what kind of name was that anyway? And here Harry thought he'd heard the most ridiculous wizarding names already—said tranquilly, tone much calmer than a minute ago. "You're quite right. She _is_ beautiful indeed, our little girl."

"And here I was, convinced it would be a boy, with all the kicking and moving around she did in my belly," the woman went on with a small laugh. Her voice was _really_ close, Harry realized sluggishly. "She will be a handful when she grows up, without a doubt."

"Just like her mother then," Bungo replied, laughing quietly with the woman—his wife surely. "She has your hair. And your nose. And your mouth also."

"Don't you think it's a little early to tell that yet? The hair looks like mine alright, but the nose..." The conversation between the two young parents was quiet and calm, their voices content and filled with happiness: slowly but surely, Harry was drifting back to sleep from how peaceful the atmosphere around him was. Thank Merlin the baby was perfectly quiet for now—and hopefully she would remain so for some time still.

"No, I can see it. Look: so small and round."

A light brushing sensation on the tip of his nose startled Harry just as he was about to let slumber take him, jerking him back to reality with a harshness that made him groan in discontentment. And just as the woman exclaimed about something or the other, scolding her husband by the sound of it, several things hit the young wizard all at once.

First, his groan sounded _nothing_ like what he knew his groan should have sounded. In fact, it was disturbingly similar to that of a baby, which was utterly ridiculous because he was almost seventeen and nowhere close to being a baby (except, according to Hermione, in acts sometimes when he and Ron behaved in a way she didn't approve of).

Second, now that he thought about it, the woman's voice was way too close, truly as if not only his ear, but his entire being was held close enough against her chest that the reverberations of her voice as she spoke were repercuted all the way through him. Not only that, but what he'd previously thought was a very comfy, warm and fluffy mattress was moving, _shifting_ in a way disturbingly reminiscent of what Harry imagined arms would when holding a baby. Except they were holding him.

Thirdly, and yes, he realized perfectly well how preposterous it sounded, but the adults seemed to be talking about him while calling him a 'baby girl'.

Harry may have been tired, but the ridiculousness of it all definitely deserved some (immediate) more investigation. He was obviously going to have to set a few things straight with these people.

Scrunching his eyebrows as the light finally achieved what it had been trying to do since earlier, half-blinding him in the process, the young wizard peered all around only to realize that his vision was incredibly blurry and didn't allow him to discern much of anything if it was further than the tip of his nose. But why was he surprised? He didn't have his glasses.

And just how long had he been sleeping exactly?

"Look what you did now, Bungo!" the woman, Bella, exclaimed severely. "You woke her up!"

Had his eyes not been opened (fact that anything further than an inch away from his face was an indistinct blurry mess not withstanding), Harry would never have realized that the voice of the woman came right from above him. In fact, he would never have realized, despite her being so blurry he couldn't distinguish her features, that she was much, _much_ bigger than she should have been compared to him.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" As Harry's attention was redirected to the panicking man, Bungo, his dread and incomprehension further worsened when he saw him as a big blurry dark spot next to the woman—a big blurry dark spot whose size was far superior to Harry's as well.

"It's not me you should be apologizing to! It's our daughter you just woke up, isn't it?"

It was at that precise moment that it hit Harry in all its ridiculously stunning clarity. He barely even paid any mind to the husband who was babbling about something or another right above him, so absorbed he was in taking his new situation in—and growing more horrified by the second.

There was no two ways to go about it. There was no way to deny something so obvious. And even though Harry couldn't explain it, could barely even fathom it, he had absolutely no doubt whatsoever. Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, was a baby. _Worse_, he was a girl.

And to his further horror and mortification, he did the only thing that he could in the body of a newborn baby girl: he cried.


	2. Names

**I was very pleasantly surprised by the response the first chapter of this story got. Thanks to everyone who alerted/favorited this, but most of all thank you a hundred times to those who took the time to review and let me know what they thought!**

**This is short, but it's the format I want to experiment with for this story, I hope that's alright with everyone!**

**And Happy Halloween!**

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"Look at her! She is so precious!"

"And look at how curly her hair is! Just like yours, Bella!

"But her eyes—this wonderful green color—entirely her father's."

"And these little feet! She is so very tiny! My word, I have never seen such a small baby before!"

"She will become a perfectly respectable hobbit, I'm sure. She's already so dainty."

"Moooooom, I want to see the baby too..."

Hell.

It was the only word that Harry could find to define his current situation, really. He was in Hell.

Two weeks already that he'd woken up in the arms of the woman, in a strange place, with strange people and in an even stranger body. Two weeks that he'd been trying to figure out what could have happened to him (a jinx? A curse? A tasteless prank? A very vivid and messed-up hallucination?) but for the life of him couldn't make any sense of it. Two weeks he'd had to bear with having no control whatsoever on his bodily functions.

Because it had to be the worst of it all: how his bladder decided to act up whenever it wished, without any sort of consideration for what little was left of his dignity; how he also had seemingly no way of preventing the sudden and erratic bursts of tears that would seize him every single time something about his newborn body bothered him or whenever he felt the slightest bit uncomfortable; or how his 'mother' had wiped his butt more times in two weeks than he dared to count—and that was without any doubt, according to Harry, the lowest of the low.

As an eighteen-year-old wizard, a full-fledged adult in the magical community well-used to taking care of himself ever since he could remember, being stuck in a body that made him completely dependent on two virtual strangers was a highly scary and stressful situation. For someone who had already been confronted to more near-death scenarios in a few short years than most people ever would be in their whole life, that had to say something.

Harry was doing his best to remain calm and collected though, and, dare he say it, up until that point he had managed quite honorably. The crowd of nearly-hysterical females (of all ages and sizes from what he'd gathered despite his still horribly muddled vision) that had burst into his room this morning had entirely changed his appreciation of things though.

Nothing could have prepared him for the smothering amount of gushes, coos and squeals, pokes, pinches and pats that he received as soon as they'd spotted him. Harry had never been used to receiving this much attention as a small child—how could it have been otherwise living with an aunt and uncle who wished he never existed? With the sort of education he'd had, any kind of demonstration of affection embarrassed him to the point that he turned into an awkward mess—still, he usually managed to deal with it just fine. Unfortunately in this brand new (and hopefuly temporary) body of his, the deep discomfort he felt was rapidly and surely bubbling up in him to entirely disproportionate dimensions, to the point that he was starting to feel the tell-tale prick of tears gathering in his eyes.

It was humiliating. Never in his whole life had Harry bawled half as much as he had in the past two weeks.

Merlin, he didn't even want to imagine the endless mocking he would have to deal with if Malfoy saw him like this... The endless mocking he would have to deal with if any of the Weasleys saw like this, actually. George and Fred sure would have had a blast.

"Aww... Her pout is simply adorable!"

"Mooooom! I want to see the baby!"

"Quiet, Melody, the adults are talking right now."

"And what is the name of this precious little girl, then, Belladonna?"

"Well, Aunt Millie-" Harry immediately recognized that voice—Bella Baggins, his 'mother'—and to his further puzzlement, what tears had been gathering in his eyes instantly vanished. "-to be honest, Bungo and I are still looking for a proper name."

A chorus of gasps erupted from all around Harry's wooden crib and the young wizard couldn't help but cringe at the sudden rise in decibels.

"Whatever do you mean, Bella dear?" another woman (really old, if the sound of her voice was anything to go by) said gently but pressingly. "She is already two weeks old! Surely you wouldn't bring bad luck on your own daughter by leaving her entirely without a name for so long?"

"Well, not exactly entirely without a name..." Belladonna conceded hesitantly. "Bungo and I were very much convinced she was a boy and so we didn't think about any girl's names."

"Oh, oh! Auntie Bella! What names did you think of?" the voice of the only little girl in the room piped up at that moment.

"Bilbo."

Throats were cleared. Silence settled upon the room for a moment and Harry squirmed in his crib.

He was rapidly growing tired of all this—two weeks of lying down all the time, of being craddled in the arms of adults whose size he should have at least equalled, of having no single bit of control on his environment, were beginning to take their toll on his patience. Not to mention that he wasn't stupid. He knew perfectly well what this gathering of hysterical females in his room meant: two weeks after his birth (the simple thought still made him shudder... he was sincerely grateful he'd been unconscious for that part) he was considered healthy enough to face the outside world.

Or rather his 'parents' felt like he was now healthy enough for some very precise and carefully-selected parts of this outside world to come and have their first look at him.

Although he didn't much appreciate the part where he was treated like a delicate and fragile glass artifact, and disliked even more the constant gushing and staring, he knew it was only a question of time now. Because with the names he'd been hearing (not to mention the one his 'parents' had taken to calling him), there was absolutely no way he was in a muggle family; that added to the distinctive English accent let him hope (desperately) that he wasn't too far from his friends that they would find him soon.

His friends...

The thought sent a painful jolt ripping through his chest. Only two weeks and already Harry missed them more than he could say—Hermione, Ron, the Weasleys, Remus and Tonks, Neville, Luna...

Last thing he could remember, he was waiting for the Order of the Phoenix to transfer him from Privet Drive to the Burrow in time for Bill and Fleur's wedding. His aunt, uncle and cousin had fled, leaving him alone in a deserted house, Hedwig's cage in one hand and his broom in the other, knowing the Deatheaters would attack any minute now... Then darkness and then... This strange place, this new set of 'parents'...

"Do you mean to say that you have been calling this precious little girl Bilbo all this time?" a new voice asked severely, breaking the silence and wrenching Harry from his troubled and quickly darkening process of thoughts.

"Well..." Belladonna said slowly—and from her tone of voice, Harry could clearly picture the woman shrugging vaguely with a sheepish expression on her face. "Maybe?"

The subsequent explosion of decibels made Harry groan moodily but no one took notice of him. The matter of his name was apparently much more important—bordering on scandalous if the level of noise was any indication—and all the women in the room had ganged up on Belladonna, forgetting about him completely.

"That's even worse than not giving her a name!"

"Do you realize what kind of future you are setting her up for?"

"Imagine the kind of tomboy she could become!"

"She already is half-Took—her reputation as a Baggins would never survive it!"

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes (although to be honest he wasn't even sure that he could anyway), Harry tuned the mindless babbling out to concentrate instead on examining his new (but only temporary, he was sure of it) body. His vision was only barely starting to get better, but if he kept whatever he was looking at close enough to his face, he could see it clearly enough: like his hand for example, small, so very small, with tiny, itsy bitsy little nails, only slightly pudgy and a healthy rosy color.

Harry could remember Hermione reading at one point about the growing up of the human body in its earlier years (because obviously magical books alone had never been enough to quench her thirst for knowledge, so she regularly kept up to date with the latest muggle scientific discoveries). Of course, when she'd tried to explain it to Harry and Ron, they'd mostly faked listening to the boring technical speech, but Harry could still remember the gist of it: a baby's eyes and brains, among other various parts and aspects of the body, kept on developping well after birth. The result being that his vision would remain blurry for a few months still, only very gradually getting better as time passed.

Still Harry hoped he would be back in his own body long before that.

"... about Crystal?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Millie, that is such a pretentious name!"

"Absolutely! A Baggins should have a much more dignified name."

"And why not Berylla? Like Grandmother?"

"Not as long as I have a say in how my first granddaughter will be named!" the oldest woman exclaimed with surprising vehemence.

"Mother is right—she had the worst temper in all of the Shire. We wouldn't want this little one to grow up to such a model, now would we?"

And on and on they went, with Harry distractedly listening to the debate as it continued endlessly without progressing the slightest bit. A distant part of him was reluctantly impressed by the feat—leave to women to talk for so long about nothing—while another, much more consequent, was quickly growing annoyed.

"What about Myrtle?" Harry's whole body went rigid in the crib at hearing that name, the vision of a certain whiny ghost girl residing in a certain bathroom in a certain magical castle hovering at the forefront of his mind ominously. Surely they would give him such a name. Surely this was some kind of horrible joke.

"Not on my life!" Harry had never heard this woman before, but he could not have been more grateful for her intervention or her vehemence on the subject, exactly voicing out loud everything he wished he could say to this pack of crazy women. "What a horrible woman! Leaving the Shire to go work in a tavern in Bree! Have you ever heard of a less respectable Hobbit?"

"Alright, alright, no need to get angry Aunt Rosa," Belladonna sighed deeply. The annoyance was beginning to pierce in her tone but Harry could still clearly hear that she was doing her best to keep the debate within the boundaries of civility—and he had to admit she wasn't a half-bad mediator.

"Well, I was just saying..." Aunt Rosa grumbled; the rest of her sentence was soon drowned by the others wanting to give their opinions though.

"Estella?"

"Pimpernel!"

"Donabella!"

That was about when Harry decided that he had just enough of all this nonsense. His exasperation combined to the accumulated worry for his friends back home quickly rising to such levels that, before he even realized it, warm fat tears were rolling down his plump cheeks and moody whimpers were escaping his lips.

The effect was so instantanous it almost seemed like magic: as soon as they heard him, all the women in the room fell silent and turned to his crib. In two seconds flat, Harry found himself surrounded by cooing women gently patting at him to supposedly calm him down.

"Oh, poor little darling..."

"She's so quiet we'd completely forgotten about her."

"We're very sorry, sweetheart—did the grown-ups scare you?"

None of their attentions helped of course. Harry didn't want these strangers witnessing his tears, didn't want them seeing him in this sorry state altogether. An adult, a fighter, a survivor in the body of a baby girl! What a joke!

"I think she must be tired," the blessed voice of Belladonna intervened. As if a calming spell had been cast on him, Harry instantly felt all his anger, frustration and worry abate; even though his tears continued rolling down his cheeks and staining the pillow his small hairless head was resting on, he had good hope he would be able to make them stop soon. He only had the time to wonder why the voice of this woman had such an intense appeasing power upon him before he found himself scooped up by warm and gentle hands. "It's well past time for her nap anyway."

"Indeed, darling," a woman whose name Harry couldn't be bothered to remember agreed warmly. "You take her back to her room while we tidy up here. It's time for us all to get back to our respective homes, I say."

"Thank you for coming, mother," Belladonna replied as she rocked Harry in her arms. Under the familiar influence of her natural warmth, the young wizard could feel himself growing less and less upset by the second. His worries and fears were still there, boiling under the surface, but Harry didn't have this terribly helpless certitude they were about to overwhelm him entirely. "Thank you all for coming. It was a pleasure to have you over."

"Of course, sweetheart, you and your delightful little girl take care now!"

"Come and see us soon! She has to meet all her cousins!"

"Not to mention all her uncles! Bodo has been asking about her everyday since the news came of her birth!"

"Of course, Linda."

To Harry's intense relief, the goodbyes barely took a minute before he was swept out of the room by his new 'mother'. She swiftly carried him through the hallways—although they were a blur, their warm wooden color was already becoming familiar to Harry, as well as the distinctive smell of fresh herbs and flowers that floated day and night in Belladonna and Bungo's home—until they reached a brightly lit and warm room.

As soon as she let the door close behind her, Belladonna sighed deeply.

"Finally," she breathed, the relief permeating that simple word almost tangible. Although her face was too far from Harry's for him to distinguish her features clearly, he still saw perfectly well how she inclined her head down to look at him, not to mention the soft smile lighting up her pretty face (as childish a thought as it was, Harry knew with the utmost certainty that she was pretty). "What perfect timing you have, Bilbo, dear. You chased them away right before they had the chance to drive your mommy crazy."

She let out a small chuckle at her own words and Harry stared up intently at her face, fascinated by the half-tired, half-content look in her deep brown eyes. He knew that look: it was that only those with families like the Weasleys would ever get. It was the look of a person exasperated by the overbearing antics of their family members but at the same time utterly happy to be surrounded and loved so. He knew of it because he'd seen it so many times on Ron's face before, but unlike his interactions with the Weasleys, this time, there wasn't this slight pang of envy he had to ignore and squash down mercilessly before it could develop into something more—there was no time for any sort of jealousy, because Belladonna Baggins was talking to him again.

"My wonderful baby girl," she whispered as one of her fingers came up to carress Harry's cheek, wiping away the last traces of tears. "My beautiful little flower."

In that moment, it didn't matter much that Belladonna Baggins was almost a stranger to him: when being watched with such unconditional motherly love, one's heart would invariably respond in kind. Harry's felt like it would burst out of his chest from the sudden surge of affection he felt towards the woman, and, for a moment, he found himself wishing that she really was his mother.

As she lowered him in the small bed and left him to sleep quietly, the young wizard dismissed the notion though: soon, very soon, his friends would find him and he would go back to his normal life, go back to fighting against Voldemort and his group of mindless followers, go back to war. As soon as he was back to his normal self, in his normal late-teenaged-boy body, he would apologize to the woman and her husband, thank them for taking care of him and then walk out of their lives.

They were good people. They didn't deserve to be targetted by Voldemort.


	3. Linett Magnolia Baggins

**Hello, dear readers!**

**Thank you very much for all the favorites, alerts, and most of all reviews! I'm very pleasantly surprised at the response this story is getting and I hope you guys will like where I'm heading with this.**

**Enjoy and please read the AN at the end of the chapter.**

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Bungo Baggins was sitting in his large armchair near the fire and reading a large volume quietly, his wife settled in a smaller (but just as comfortable, he'd commissioned it especially for her after all) one right in front of him. The hour was still early Harry knew, since they had yet to put him to bed, but already night had fallen, plunging their house in darkness and quiet.

"The days are so short already," Belladonna sighed, her fingers gently grabbing Harry's tiny hand before she started playing with it absent-mindedly.

Through narrowed eyes (Harry's vision was still rather bad and squinting was a reflexive, if useless, way to try and see a little bit better) the teenager-turned-baby in her arms peered up at her. It was something that he'd noticed as well—how early the sunset actually happened—but had endeavoured to ignore for the past few days, ever since the suspicion had sunk in.

As an infant, pretty much paralyzed in his crib, and with no other entertainment than his own thoughts, his appreciation of time had become quite inaccurate. Apart from a few landmarks to help him evaluate the passing hours throughout the day such as meals and tea-time, unless someone explicitly mentioned it, he would have been incapable of trying to figure out on his own what hour it was: his days, to his neverending desolation, had become one big blur of constant thinking and reflexions about whatever passed through his mind. It had consequently been easy to ignore this one inconsistency before it started bugging him too much—the difference in dates between what he last remembered as Harry Potter, and his estimation of his 'birth' as Bungo and Belladonna's impostor daughter.

Late spring, with the days steadily growing longer, exams getting closer... Harry distinctly remembered a private session with Snape mentally raping his memories once more, then his memories of him going back to the common room grew hazier until he joined up with Hermione and Ron. He barely even remembered their conversation that night as they tried for the umpteenth time to figure out what Malfoy was plotting. Then his mind went blank until he woke up in this strange place. Obviously, something had happened that night while he was asleep, and he needed to figure out what very soon.

"We need to get all that's left of our vegetables in bocals tomorrow," Bungo muttered, not looking up from his book. "I'm not sure we'll have enough for the whole of winter though. I'll have to see with Master Gamgee about buying some more."

In any case, Harry did his best to concentrate on anything except his disbelief and confusion: the difference between the last thing he remembered as Harry, in his own _male and almost fully-grown _body, and his estimated arrival in the Baggins' house, only served to make him that much more uncomfortable about this whole predicament. Or maybe he was a lot further north than he should have been? Harry was by no means a good student when it came to astronomy, but weren't winter days supposed to be even shorter the further up north you went? Wait, didn't Sinistra say that in the summer the days were on the contrary a lot longer? Coming to think of it, Hogwarts was situated somewhere in Scotland and the difference in length of days between the castle and the Dursleys had always been quite consequent.

Well, there went his little theory...

"Ask him about that fruit jam his wife prepares for their children as well," Belladonna asked quietly. Her fingers let go of Harry's to instead rest her entire hand on his round belly, stroking it (Harry tried not to let himself ponder overly much about how calming the warm sensation was).

In any case, Belladonna and Bungo's reassuring presences helping, the young wizard simply refused to envisage the possibility that he had a big black gap in his memories between the last thing he remembered as Harry Potter, and his awakening as 'Bilbo'. Because a big black gap couldn't be a good sign. Because anything could have happened to his friends and loved ones during that big black gap. Because a big black gap was a lot more terrifying than anything else he'd ever experienced so he would ignore that idea as long as he could possibly afford to and deal with the consequences later.

It wasn't even the only thing bugging him anyway. The quickly shortening days had also brought on an easy confirmation to his suspicions that the Baggins weren't a muggle family: they didn't use electricity for lighting. They didn't use electricity for anything, for that matter. There were candles and chandeliers that Bungo was in charge of lighting up when the sun went down each evening, Belladonna cooked with an oven using firewood (as far as Harry could identify just by his sense of smell since his eyesight still left much to be desired), and there wasn't a single modern muggle appliance anywhere in sight.

In any normal circumstances, Harry would have consequently deduced with the utmost certainty that he was indeed under the care of wizards. Except he'd never seen any of his 'parents' use magic for anything.

So far, the young wizard didn't quite know what to make of it. Although he was far from an expert about things magical and wizarding families, what with being brought up by muggles, he didn't think there were many families out there that wouldn't use a single bit of magic in their home. He knew perfectly well that the Weasleys were far from being average, but he had kind of imagined other magical homes throughout Britain would have some common points with the Burrow—not necessarily the fascinating family clock (one of a kind, Mrs Weasley had proudly assured him), but maybe a couple of needles knitting on their own somewhere? Or at least a couple of animated photos or talking paintings? With the way he'd heard Bungo talk about his family (from the long rant he overheard on one occasion, he understood the Baggins name apparently had some sort of reputation in the whole region, which had at first made him fear he was in some sort of eccentric pureblood family), there should have been a few ancestors portraits randomly speaking up when Belladonna carried him throughout the house. But no.

Not to mention that even though Bungo seemed obsessed with his garden and his prize-winning tomatoes, and spoke of them practically everyday, Harry had never heard him complain once against gnomes—and gnomes were attracted to magical houses like bees to honey!

It was a conundrum, and a very frustrating one at that because unable to move and talk freely as he was, Harry couldn't hope to solve it anytime soon.

"Look at you, with your little nose all scrunched up." The warm and familiar voice of Belladonna Baggins wrenched Harry from his musings and the fingers that had previously been massaging his belly lightly started tickling his sides instead. "What are you thinking about, sweetheart?"

Harry squirmed in his 'mother's arms and was mortified when an entirely unwanted giggle flew past his lips and resounded loud and clear in the otherwise silent room. His reaction, as unbidden as it had been, only seemed to convince Belladonna that what she was doing was appreciated (and no, Harry would not listen to this little voice in the back of his head telling him he _liked_ the attention) and she laughed softly, her fingers nimbly running over his ribs and evading any attempt Harry made to catch them.

Bungo chuckled as well and the sound of paper and clothes shifting alerted Harry, despite his being otherwise preoccupied, that the man was observing them and obviously enjoying the spectacle. "_Thinking_, Bella, are you sure?" he said, tone filled with genuine amusement. "I can't imagine such a little one doing much thinking at all." If only Harry could snort he would have: ever since he'd awakened here, he'd done absolutely nothing but thinking all day long, day after day—so much thinking he sometimes grew exhausted of it.

"Oh, I'm very sure, Bungo," Belladonna retorted without an ounce of doubt in her tone. Her fingers stilled and Harry had to gather all his will-power not to give in to the temptation to pout—no, he was most certainly not disappointed she'd stopped!

The answering huff from Bungo was as humorous as it was dismissive. "Bella, love," he said, quite patronizingly (the man was always very affectionate towards his wife though and Harry had the feeling Bungo didn't even realize that he was digging his own grave with each word he spoke). "I am the first to admit that our little Bilbo is quite a bright baby girl for her age—but babies can't think. They can't understand what we say. Why, I would honestly be very surprised to learn she thinks of anything else other than eating and sleeping!"

Ah, if only Harry could snort and reply to that...

Instead he settled for the next best thing: he blew a sloppy rapsberry from his position in Belladonna's arms before he let out a garbled babble that didn't mean anything to anyone except himself.

_If only you knew, mate. If only you knew._

"Obviously you should be paying more attention to your daughter, Bungo," his 'mother' replied a bit stiffly. She never appreciated when her husband started talking to her like he knew everything better, as he sometimes unfortunately tended to.

Wise man that he was, Bungo instantly picked up on the young woman's tone. "Oh, Bella, you know I didn't mean-"

"Of course you didn't mean it," she cut him off, tone unyielding. And that was that. Harry was always quite entertained by the way Belladonna effortlessly kept her husband in check whenever he did or said something she didn't appreciate (to be fair, it didn't happen all that often). "If you look at her attentively you can see it: she has exactly the same air as you do when you get lost in your own musings."

There was a small silence before the man finally spoke, sounding pleased. "Does she?"

Harry felt more than he heard the beginning of a laugh bubbling in Belladonna's chest at his words. "You proud, foolish hobbit," she said, although her tone was too fond and belying her words entirely. In her arms the teenaged wizard turned baby again tried to look up at her and squirmed to get a better view of her face—no use, he still didn't get what all this 'hobbit' business was. Some kind of affectionate name only a particular community of wizards and witches somewhere in Britain used, maybe? "Of course your daughter looks like you. Every single member of our family has been telling you so for weeks now, there's no need to look so satisfied about it still!"

"Ah, well..."

"And there is absolutely no doubt about it, Bungo: our daughter is not normal. She's..." Harry couldn't help but tense slightly as the woman looked down at him with such intense brown eyes he felt like she could see right through him. "... so much more than that."

The young wizard didn't like much the turn this conversation was taking. He tried to distract them with the usual horribly massacred vocalizes that normally had all the adults cooing down at him for ages, but other than the shadow of a smile on the woman's face above his own, he didn't get the reaction he wanted. Bungo himself barely paid attention to him.

"What do you mean?" the man asked, curiosity unmistakable in his voice.

Belladonna remained quiet for a few seconds, seemingly looking for the right words, and Harry was left to wait tensedly in her arms.

Was she somehow suspecting who he truly was under that innocent (and inappropriately young) exterior? Had he been acting so much more differently than a true newborn baby? He'd tried to behave as he imagined a baby would, but considering his complete lack of experience in that domain, he couldn't be too sure about his credibility or his talent for acting. If so would she discover who he truly was? And would she hand him over to Voldemort and his minions? After all, giving them the one and only Harry Potter, boy-who-lived, arch-nemesis and personal pest of the Dark Lord, would pretty much guarantee her and her family's safety in the upcoming war (a war for which the Light's odds didn't look particularly bright).

It felt like an eternity before she talked again. "She's intelligent, I can tell. I think she'll be extraordinary, our little Bilbo." Her words themselves weren't enough, but the loving kiss she bestowed upon his forehead calmed Harry down considerably.

As everyone remained quiet, the teenager was left to ponder, not for the first or the last time, why exactly this woman he barely even knew had such a considerable influence on his feelings.

"You know," Bungo suddenly said, his voice so soft Harry almost missed it. "Somehow, I think you're right. I have no idea why, but there is absolutely no doubt in my heart that Bilbo really is something else."

When silence settled over them once again, the atmosphere was considerably more peaceful than it had been all evening long. Apart from Belladonna's calm breathing and heartbeat against him, the only sounds Harry could otherwise hear were the occasional cracks and hisses of the wood coming from the fire in the hearth.

The Baggins' really was a nice home. Not for the first time, the evanescent thought formed in Harry's mind that if he had ever had a family and a home, he would have wished for it to be like this. He squashed the idea quickly though—he wouldn't be staying here much longer anyway.

"By the way, are your sisters and aunts still bugging you about choosing a name for her?"

The arms shifted under Harry's tiny body, letting him know that Belladonna had just shrugged. "As far as I'm concerned, I think Bilbo suits her. It's an uncommon name—it has character. And the more I get to know her, the more I think it'll suit her."

"You know I agree with you, Bella, but still we'll need a normal girl's name for her birth certificate."

"That's true, and I had an idea earlier today. What do you think of Linett?"

Harry's wince went completely unnoticed.

Being called Bilbo when he was already hyperaware of being in fact _Harry_ was already bad enough. Being called a girl's name and this way incessantly reminding him that he was very much a _boy_ in a _girl_'s body was even worse! Couldn't they just stick to Bilbo and call it quits? Ignore the family's well-meaning (and nosy) opinions? He could handle being addressed by another name, as long as he didn't have to deal at the same time with the fact that his current body was not his own. He just needed time to incorporate and deal with each issue one after another, at his own pace—they seriously couldn't be thinking on dumping all of this on him at the same time, could they?

_Merlin, no. Tell me they wouldn't..._

"What a wonderful name, my dear!" Bungo exclaimed, blissfully unaware of his 'daughter''s intense and instantaneous dislike of the name already. "How did you get that idea? Was it one of your many well-intentioned family members that recommanded it?"

"No, no," Belladonna replied tranquilly. Harry felt a finger tap his nose gently, a teasing but affectionate gesture that was becoming quite frequent from the adult woman, quickly followed by another loving kiss to his forehead—and despite his best efforts Harry couldn't hold back the garbled, not-quite-giggle that flew past his lips when she lightly tickled his side. In turn, the two adults chuckled and a large hand, tanned, hairy and obviously male, grabbed his much smaller pudgy one and held it delicately. "I just had the idea the other day, with all these little noises she makes sometimes—she sounds like a little bird."

Harry could only inwardly curse himself at the revelation while Bungo let a full-bellied laugh, apparently thinking the whole thing was quite funny. "True enough!" he exclaimed, sounding suddenly very joyful. "A good name that is, very appropriate!"

"Isn't it?" Belladonna immediately agreed, sounding quite pleased.

"Indeed. We only need to find a good middle name then and both our families should forgive us for the time it took us to decide."

Expressing out loud what Harry was unable to voice himself (please, _please_, not another girl's name...) the young woman groaned audibly and slumped in her armchair in a rare demonstration of unladylike behavior. "Isn't Bilbo a perfectly good name?" she said with the slightest hint of exasperation piercing in her tone. "Linett suits her to a certain extent but calling her anything else other than Bilbo feels... wrong."

_Good_! Harry thought vehemently, childishly wishing he could project his thoughts loud enough for the adults to hear him.

"Bella, my love, you know as well as I do that none of our families will stand for such a name." Bungo's tone had turned quite careful, knowing that an irritated Belladonna was not easy to deal with—_smart man_, thought Harry derisively. "I agree with you: she is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, a Bilbo, and that's what I'll call her (and knowing your father I have the feeling he'll quite like that name as well), but for her official birth certificate, we need well... a _normal_ name."

His wife sighed deeply, sign that she understood the reasoning behind her husband's warning and reluctantly agreed with him. "How much time do we have left to decide?"

"Considering that we both come from respectable families, Blanco Goodbody is willing to give us another week before he completes the official papers."

"Well, isn't he just the epitome of generosity..." Bella grumbled in a tone that implied the exact contrary and made Harry snicker (with his utter lack of control on his vocal chords, lips and tongue, it came out more as a strange sneeze-hiccup hybrid that earned him odd looks from his 'parents').

"No need to look so glum, my love," Bungo comforted her, tone completely unconcerned as if he had it all figured out. "I actually have an idea of my own for her middle name."

"Do you now?"

"Nothing elaborate, but you often call Bilbo your little flower. And considering that your favorite flowers happen to be Magnolias..."

While Harry inwardly grieved the death of what was left of his male-self-esteem, resigning himself to be officially known by two _very_ girly names for as long as he was here, Belladonna remained pensive for a few seconds. "You're right," she said slowly. "I do call her 'my little flower' all the time, so it only seemed appropriate."

"It suits her," the doting husband agreed in a quiet and peaceful tone. "She's an incredibly well-behaved baby after all, truly as pretty and poised as a flower."

"And while Bilbo is a strong name, Linett and Magnolia both correspond to other aspects of her personality," Belladonna added as if thinking out loud. "Well! I think that we won't need one more week after all!"

"Glad to know we agree! I'll go to Hobbiton's hall tomorrow and inform Blanco of our decision. Knowing him the official announcement will be published by the end of the week. After that it won't be long before we have to introduce our little Linett Magnolia Baggins to all our neighbours."

The newly decided name made the young wizard want to cringe in horror. His only consolation was at least that the two people he interacted with the most, Bungo and Belladonna Baggins, wouldn't be using it.

"I'm not looking forward to explaining to my mother why we chose those names though," Belladonna mused quietly. "I have told her before that Bilbo is already showing sign of a strong personality, but she laughed it off. She said that babies so young didn't have any preferences or distinctive traits whatsoever."

"Maybe normal babies don't," Bungo retorted in that dismissive tone that was always accompanied by a shrug. "Bilbo isn't normal though, I just know it."

Belladonna loudly mock-gasped at her husband's words, lightly jostling Harry in her arms. "Bungo! How can you say such a thing? Our little Linett will be a perfectly respectable hobbit, appreciated throughout the Shire for her respectable name and respectable manners and overall complete respectability!" From the fake, overly stuck-up tone she'd adopted, it was easy enough to tell that she was imitating her many reputation-obsessed family members (and Harry had the feeling it was a very precise person too, but wasn't familiar enough with the individuals to tell exactly which one).

The sound of a good-hearted slap was heard in the otherwise silent room, shortly followed by a surprised yelp from the woman still holding Harry. "Don't tease, Bella," Bungo rebuked her lightly, smile clearly audible in his voice. "You know Aunt Pansy means well."

"I'm sure she does..." Belladonna replied on a tone that implied the exact contrary. "But I hope it is very clear to you Bungo: I will encourage Bilbo to become whatever she wants to be. As long as she's happy, that's all I could wish for, no matter the reputation it earns our family. And you know it's not that I don't care about the Baggins name and its respectability in the Shire, we Took simply don't care what our neighbours think."

"Of course you wouldn't," Bungo muttered lowly in response. Harry got the feeling that his wife wasn't supposed to hear that and the comment indeed earned the man a reprimanding slap on the arm (in the short time the teenager had known the two adults, he'd rapidly realized that Belladonna wasn't the type to take long before she got even).

"I'll pretend you didn't say that and go put our little one to bed now." And just as his 'mother' said these words, Harry felt her shift and move, the motion quickly followed by a soring sensation alerting him to the fact that she was rising from her seat. Soon enough he could feel the slight, rhythmic rocking as she started walking, presumably taking him back to his room. "Be a gentle-hobbit and do take care of the dishes while I prepare Bilbo for bed?"

Although voiced as a question, any intelligent man would have understood it was the furthest thing from a request—at least, Harry and his 'father' got the message quite clearly. "Of course, darling," Bungo instantly replied. "Don't worry about that."

No further words were exchanged as Belladonna left the room and silence fell back on the Baggins' quiet and peaceful home.

It was only several minutes later, when Harry was changed into his baby pajamas (thankfully without any frills or pink anywhere, he had checked), that the teenaged wizard was left to wonder for the umpteenth time what a 'hobbit' was and if he would actually figure it out before his friends came for him. If he didn't, he had no doubt Hermione wouldn't hesitate a second to set him straight and scold him for his lack of attention in whatever class had covered the subject in Hogwarts.

* * *

**/!\ ANSWER TO REVIEWS (I've been asked these questions several times and I won't answer anymore reviews asking me this again):**

**- About pairings. Harry is currently physically a _baby,_ his mindset is that of a man, not a girl, not to mention he still considers himself a wizard and human as opposed to a non-magical hobbit, so there is still a very long way to go before Harry/Bilbo considers any _male_ being as a potential partner for a relationship (I have absolutely nothing against yaoi, but I could never bring myself to believe that Harry had any sort of inclination towards males, even though I've admittedly read some pretty good stories about the subject). This directly brings us to the second point I'd like to clear up.  
**

**- One of my little obsessions as a writer is character development. It's precisely why I started this story in the first place: I would like to explore, among other things, how a character like Harry, male, brave, independent, etc. could become a (relatively - no miracles possible there) typical hobbit, mostly interested in his prize-winning tomatoes and mother's doilies (sounds weird, right? I'm going to have so much fun with this!). I plan on publishing a large number of drabbles about his life with the Baggins, to show how he, himself, turns into a Baggins and comes to accept them eventually as his family, accept himself as a non-magical hobbit, and most of all accept himself as a _female_.**

** IN OTHER WORDS: THIS STORY WILL BE VERY SLOW IN THE MAKING AND THE ACTUAL MEETING BETWEEN HARRY AND THE DWARVES WON'T HAPPEN BEFORE A LONG TIME, ONLY IN THE SECOND PART OF THIS STORY. (Sorry for the capitalized phrase, that felt like overkill, but I'm afraid a lot of people aren't going to read this - to be honest I rarely do... unless I see an unusual amount of big letters)**

**I hope this won't disappoint you too badly, but I'm afraid that's how I always write my stories. I'm quite obsessed with keeping my stories as realistic as possible (within reason, this is fanfiction we're talking about here after all) and consequently take things quite slowly. If this doesn't correspond to what you wanted to hear, I strongly recommend you find something else to read: there are a number of very good Hobbit fanfictions that deal primarily with the Company and that will be more entertaining and exciting than a family orientated fic.**

**With that being said, thank you very much to those who took the time to read this note. If you have any comments or critics, I'll be glad to hear them so don't hesitate to review or write a PM.**

**Cheers,**

**NNITW**


	4. Of proactivity

**Hello!**

**Thank you very much for all the reviews, alerts and favorites. I realized lately that this story's very idea is a lot stranger than I'd realized at first, which makes me very happy it's getting such a positive response.**

**A rather short one this time, I'm afraid, but to compensate I'll post the next drabble more rapidly.**

**In which Harry starts being more proactive...**

* * *

Harry had never suspected before just how much effort the human body went through just for the simple act of sitting up.

It hadn't been long before, utterly exasperated with his constant lying down on his back, he'd tried to move around a bit more. At the beginning he'd had to content himself with simply rolling over to lie on his side, or on his front (with Belladonna or Bungo rolling him back on his back soon after as if it was somehow bad for him). He'd also tried to crawl on his hands and knees, as he'd always seen babies do in these short and cute and funny videos on telly that made Dudley laugh so much, but he'd soon had to resign himself to the fact that his weak baby body wasn't quite ready for that big step yet.

That realization had been a lot more depressing than he had suspected. With the acute awareness of the strain the slightest movement put on each of his muscles, came the intense longing for his former body—his friends—his _life—_and most of all the desire to get some sort of control back.

So he was going to take it baby-step after baby-step. Literally.

And Harry honestly didn't care how long it would take him, or the amount of efforts he would have to put into it, or the suspicion it might earn him from his 'parents' because he wasn't acting like a young baby ought to. He wanted- _needed_ to get back some measure of control on his life, even if it was a really small thing like sitting on his own—that would be the first step, sitting up.

It took a lot longer than he would have preferred, days that soon turned into weeks—although he didn't dare count. Really, Harry had never imagined it was so hard to learn how to move, for a brand new body to develop the necessary muscles to support its own weight, nor did he suspect he would one day feel so acutely the strain the effort made on every single one of his muscles. But he wasn't a Gryffindor for no reason: he had the kind of courage that enabled him to persevere despite the difficulties.

He soon managed to sit up on his own, to the delight of his 'parents' who couldn't stop marvelling over his achievement for an entire day (and felt the need to inform their respective parents of it through immediate letters). Thankfully enough, from that point on, learning how to crawl was almost easy and only took a couple weeks more. By the time he'd achieved these two considerable improvements, his vision was almost normal, if a bit blurry still around the edges.

Thus his exploration of the Bagginses' house began.

Although it wasn't quite as simple as he would've expected: Belladonna was keeping a careful watch on him, quasi-permanently. Escaping from her vigilant surveillance was turning out to be way more difficult than it had been to sneak out of Gryffindor Tower after curfew, and not simply because he didn't have his invisibility cloak. He seriously hoped it wasn't a normal kind of behavior for a mother, but he sometimes had the feeling that she was a tiny bit obsessed with his safety.

Needless to say, after being an almost-adult wizard well-used to fend for himself, Harry found the attention nothing short of smothering. And while at first his attempts at escaping had been primarily motivated by his desire to find out more about his surroundings (and consequently how he could possibly get home and back to his friends), they soon became prompted by the sole desire to get away from his 'mother'.

She was a very nice and attentive mother—Harry could easily admit it—but he simply wasn't used to this amount of affection being showered upon him night and day. To be honest he doubted he ever would be.

With his still being in the process of getting used to his new (and temporary) body, Harry's escape plans remained completely unsuccessful for the first couple of weeks and Belladonna Baggins invariably caught him back before he had the time to crawl more than a few feet away from her. She seemed to grow more and more amused with each new attempt though (as a contrast to Harry who in the meanwhile was growing quite irritated with the whole thing) and never lost her patience; in fact she never forgot to tell her husband of the day's escapades over dinner that very night.

Harry's perseverance was to be rewarded after all though. All his efforts had not been in vain.

His chance came one sunny afternoon as his mother was putting the last finishing touches to some sort of tea-party she was preparing. Some guests (Harry hadn't really paid attention to whom exactly) were to arrive any minute and the young mother was running a bit late—nothing drastic, surely, as the woman was just as strict as Professor Mcgonagall when she wanted to be, but apparently enough for her to pay less attention to Harry than she usually would have.

The teenaged wizard, in his tiny six-month-old-or-so baby girl body, didn't hesitate a second to grab this chance.

As soon as he'd ascertained that Belladonna Took was fully absorbed in the icing of her freshly baked cake, he started crawling as quietly as he could towards the open doorway leading from the kitchen to the living room. His movements were clumsy as ever, but thanks to the smooth wooden floor, he managed to keep them silent enough for his escape to go unnoticed. He held his breath as long as he was in the kitchen and only relaxed when he reached the next room and the woman still didn't notice his sneaking away.

Of course he'd started to get the lay-out of the house a lot better in the past few weeks, ever since his sight had been good enough for him to actually discern objects that were further than within-arm's-reach-distance. And he also had a pretty good idea of what was to be found in which room, however there were still a number of things he needed to investigate in depth, the matter of _where_ he was only being the most pressing.

The most puzzling that he still couldn't quite understand was what community he'd landed in: these _hobbits_, whoever they were exactly, were quite clearly not magical. He'd realized that fact not too long after his sight had gotten good enough for him to see things better around him, about when Belladonna and Bungo Baggins had taken him out of the house for the first time. What he'd seen had appalled him. No trace of magic anywhere in sight, and to top that worrying prospect, no sign of technology whatsoever. Although this country looked very green and pretty and peaceful and happy (and a whole lot of other positive adjectives Harry found too disgustingly sweet to think about at the moment), it was, for a lack of a better word, _medieval_.

To be honest, the young wizard wasn't sure what to think of it. Albeit, he mostly regretted not having Hermione around to help—Hermione would have known about the Muggle communities in Britain who lived cut from the rest of the modern world.

Instead of mulling over these worrying and destabilising prospects, Harry had decided to do whatever it took to get himself back home, starting with find a way to get inside his 'father''s study. If there was anywhere he would be able to find concrete information (preferrably some sort of map) it had to be in that enormous desk of his.

And he was _almost_ there.

He just had to crawl through the living room, then through the hallways deeper inside the house. He would figure out how to actually get _inside_ the study once he got there.

"Haha! What have we got here?" The overly loud exclamation boomed through the house like thunder to his young and sensitive ears. Harry froze at the sound well before a pair of huge, very hairy feet (yet another puzzling detail Harry had noticed only recently about this queer community; that and the pointy ears made him suspect all these people weren't entirely human—a theory he wasn't taking too seriously for now though) stopped in front of him. Not a second later, he found himself grasped by two equally large and hairy hands, and lifted in the air like he didn't weigh more than a feather. "Is that the little pest I heard of that has my daughter running about all day long?"

Harry kept very still in the man's hands as he was faced with an aged and severe face, sharp brown eyes peering at him like they could read right through him. He felt so uncomfortable it didn't even occur to him to mourn his lost opportunity to explore.

"Gerontius, you promised you would be nice!" That other voice, old and filled with kindness, was also familiar to Harry; it was that of Adamanta Took, Belladonna's mother and his 'grandmother'. Its effect on the man holding up Harry was immediate and quite surprising to see: the man's eyes went from unforgiving black to warm brown, his menacing frown smoothed over and only left behind deep wrinkles in a tanned face.

"Oh, Ada, my love, I'm only teasing," he said. "It's the first time I meet my granddaughter after all, I have to make an impression."

"And what sort of impression is it if you terrorize the poor girl, you great big dunce?"

While the man in question sheepishly tried to justify himself, Harry could only think that the great and big part of '_great big_ dunce' was a very apt description indeed: he was massive. Granted, Harry hadn't needed long to realize that this strange community had stouter men than the normal Muggles, but this Gerontius was in a category of his own. He wasn't necessarily larger than others (although he was quite large, Harry had already seen worse) but rather a lot taller than what Harry was used to. And as a small baby spending his time crawling on the ground or in the arms of another person, it was usually difficult for him to make a difference between people's sizes, but the sheer size of this man was flagrant, even in his current state.

"Father! Mother! Bilbo snuck away a-" A rather flustered Belladonna suddenly irrupted in the room, hair in disarray and eyes filled with such intense worry that for a second Harry couldn't help but slightly feel bad. She froze at the sight of Harry in the man's hands. "Oh."

"Hello, Bella, dear," Adamanta Took greeted warmly and immediately went to her daughter to hug her. "We found little Bilbo here just a minute ago."

"Energetic little thing, isn't she?" Gerontius, apparently Harry's 'grandfather', said sterny, although there was a twinkle of amusement in his eyes.

"You don't know the half of it," Belladonna shook her head with a long sigh. "Ever since she figured out how to crawl, she's been trying to go off on her own. I can't leave her alone for a second unless she disappears somewere inside the house and hurt herself."

"She has?" Gerontius repeated, both bushy dark gray eyebrows rising in surprise. When his sharp little brown eyes came back to Harry who was still dangling awkwardly in his hands, the young wizard saw in them what clearly looked like interest.

"A born Took, like I told you, Gerontius," Adamanta said with a decisive nod and a wide happy smile.

"Interesting, interesting..."

Belladonna wiped her sugar-covered hands on her apron and extended her hands for Harry. "I'm still putting the last finishing touches to the cakes and Bungo's parents haven't arrived yet, but come with me to the kitchen! We can talk the three of us before Mrs. Laura and Mr. Mungo come and join us."

"Good idea, dear," her mother instantly agreed and without further ado, marched towards the kitchen, already rolling her sleeves up. "I'll give you a hand."

"Thank you, mother," Belladonna said with a fond, but slightly exasperated smile, before holding out her hands more insistently for baby Harry.

"You go ahead, Bella," Gerontius said with a reassuring nod. He shifted his hold on Harry so that he properly held him in his arms, close to his body, rather than at arm's length. Harry couldn't help but frown at him suspiciously: he knew that look, he'd spent too much time with Fred and George not to recognize it anymore—what was the old man plotting? "I'll keep an eye on that little monster while you and your mother finish up what you have to."

That declaration seemed to surprise the young mother and she looked at her father for a few seconds, visibly disconcerted, before she nodded slowly. "Very well."

Harry didn't have much time to consider Belladonna's strange reaction though: she turned around and headed after her mother inside the kitchen, her father following at a much more sedate pace. He would ponder later over the pecularities of Belladonna Baggins and her relationship with her enormous and intimidating father.

"So, little Linett-Magnolia-Bilbo..." the man in question began in a low voice. Harry barely resisted the urge to cringe at his full name and looked up curiously at the older man. "You're a born adventurer, aren't you?"

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**Anonymous reviewer response:**

**Isobel: Thank you very much for your review, I'm glad you enjoy this story. More importantly I'm happy you enjoy reading about Harry's baby years, because we're definitely going to read a lot of these: between his meeting his new family, all the different evolutions he'll have to go through to fully accept himself as a hobbit and a girl, we're going to stick with (very) young Harry for a while. Good thing Harry is such a resourceful and adaptable character! ;)**

**TO ALL OF YOU WHO HAVE BEEN WONDERING: of course, proper explanations will be given to Harry, not yet though. I'm not going to spoil anything so you'll have to wait for those as well!**

**Thank you for reading.**


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